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NOTEBOOK – One Good Read: How providing online grocery shopping is affecting traditional grocery store customers

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When Whole Foods Market began in Austin, Texas, in 1980, it was a place where shoppers could browse through a selection of natural foods at their leisure.

Today the company, bought by Amazon.com in 2017, is inundated with Prime Now shoppers scurrying through the store to fill grocery orders for customers, report Heather Haddon and Jaewon Kang for the Wall Street Journal.

“The folks running around to fill delivery orders is just unpleasant, San Diego resident Julie Gelfat, who has stopped shopping at Whole Foods, told the Journal. 

Since Amazon’s move into the grocery delivery business, other U.S. supermarkets have also expanded the availability of online shopping, making deals with delivery companies such as Instacart, which has a presence in Central Iowa, to pick out and deliver groceries to customers. 

A Gallup poll this summer found that 81% of respondents had never ordered groceries online, but that is quickly changing, the Journal reporters wrote. A market research firm recently reported that Instacart sales at Kroger and Costco Wholesale Corp. have nearly doubled in the past year.

Amazon sees delivery from Whole Foods as a key part of expanding its Prime membership program, according to the Journal article. The company has added free two-hour delivery to Prime members from Whole Foods stores in about 90 U.S. markets. Earlier this year, the company said demand for delivery from Whole Foods is exceeding expectations causing Whole Foods to remodel some stores to keep shoppers for online customers out of the way of traditional grocery customers.